TV News LIES

A federal panel reviewing Donald Trump’s planned $400m ballroom addition to the White House postponed an expected vote on the project until next month, after receiving thousands of negative public comments.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) had been expected to cast a final vote on the proposal on Thursday, but instead, the chair of the commission announced at the beginning of the meeting that the vote would now be held on 2 April, citing the “large amount of public input” submitted during the public comment period.

A federal panel reviewing Donald Trump’s planned $400m ballroom addition to the White House postponed an expected vote on the project until next month, after receiving thousands of negative public comments.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) had been expected to cast a final vote on the proposal on Thursday, but instead, the chair of the commission announced at the beginning of the meeting that the vote would now be held on 2 April, citing the “large amount of public input” submitted during the public comment period.

“We’re going to take the time to deliberate, and we’re going to have a final vote on April 2,” Will Scharf, the NCPC chair and top aide to Trump, said on Thursday as the meeting began, according to CNN.

Before the meeting, the commission released more than 9,000 pages of public comments it received about the project. The commission has said that more than 35,000 people had submitted written comments, with the majority opposing Trump’s plans to build a 90,000 sq ft ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, and condemning the demolition of the East Wing, which began in October.

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The federal trade court judge overseeing the refund process for President Trump’s tariffs ordered the administration Wednesday to   paperwork for imported goods without charging companies for the invalidated levies.

The order from Richard Eaton, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade, is set to impact millions of tariff entries submitted to the government that were declared illegal by the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision.

Companies won’t immediately receive money, but the order marks a milestone that moves the laborious process along.

More than 1,000 companies have sued for refunds, hoping the government will now return tens of billions of dollars following the much-anticipated decision. Eaton’s ruling came in the lawsuit filed by Atmus Filtration, but he said the trade court’s chief judge has put him in charge of all cases pertaining to refunds.

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President Donald Trump announced March 5 he was replacing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after lawmakers grilled her this week about a $220 million ad campaign that featured her prominently.

Trump announced on social media that Noem would be succeeded by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, effective March 31.

Trump said Noem would become special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, his initiative for security against narcotics trafficking in the western hemisphere.

The shift came after Noem was grilled by Republicans and Democrats at the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 3 and the House Judiciary Committee on March 4 about her ad campaign. She testified that she had discussed the campaign with Trump and he approved it.

"I never knew anything about it," Trump told Reuters in a phone interview.

The ads prominently featured Noem, including in a scene filmed on horseback at Mount Rushmore in the former South Dakota governor's home state.

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The day after the US and Israel launched their war on Iran, and the subsequent Iranian counterattack against US bases in the Gulf, Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that the UK government would intervene in the conflict in two ways.

First, by intercepting Iranian drones and missiles to protect states not previously involved in the conflict.

And second, by allowing the US to use British bases for “specific and limited" defensive action against Iranian missile sites used to attack Gulf partners.

In his speech on 1 March outlining the government’s position, Starmer explained that the only way to stop the threat from Iranian missiles "is to destroy the missiles at source, in their storage depots or the launchers which are used to fire the missiles”.

He said that the UK would not join the US and Israel in their offensive strikes but would instead focus on “defensive actions”.

Starmer told the UK parliament: “We were not involved in the initial strikes on Iran, and we will not join offensive action now, but in the face of Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones, we will protect our people in the region, and support the collective self-defence of our allies, because that is our duty to the British people.

“It is the best way to eliminate the urgent threat, to prevent the situation spiralling further, and support a return to diplomacy. It is the best way to protect British interests, and British lives. That is what this government is doing.”

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In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that he launched the war because Iran was “going to attack first,” calling it a “big lie.”

“There was no intention on the part of Iran to attack the United States,” he said. “They claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Baghaei added. “Did we come to the Gulf of Mexico to target Los Angeles and other U.S. cities? Or did they come 6,500 miles away to Iranian shores?”

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. decided to preemptively attack Iran because the White House knew Israel was going to begin bombing Iran and that Iran would strike back. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

On Tuesday, Trump sought to recast the U.S. rationale and said that he believed Iran was going to launch an attack first. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first—I felt strongly about that,” Trump said, charging that the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others.”

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“On the US calendar it’s still March 4,” Jabbarli said, “but so much happens in a single day that sometimes it would normally take months or years.”

Ramin Jabbarli is a sociologist and the director of the Seattle-based Foundation for Inclusive Society, an NGO that regularly monitors the human rights situation in Iran. He told Kyiv Post that since airstrikes began last Saturday, it has not only been the internet – but even phone lines have been cut off.

“It’s not only about protests,” Jabbarli said. “They don’t want information to spread quickly… They want to limit communications.”

Monitoring group NetBlocks reported Iran’s connectivity falling to around 1% of ordinary levels during the blackout. Jabbarli said some footage escapes via satellite links like Starlink or through devices brought out of the country, but described those routes as limited and risky.

The most urgent political question, Jabbarli said, is what comes after Khamenei – and whether the succession stabilizes the system or becomes another trigger for conflict.

“There are different alternatives being discussed,” he said. “One is Khamenei’s son. Another is [Iran’s first supreme leader Ruhollah] Khomeini’s grandson. Hassan Rouhani is also mentioned.”

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A respiratory virus that doesn’t have a vaccine or a specific treatment regimen is spreading in some parts of California — but there’s no need to sound the alarm just yet, public health officials say.

A majority of Northern California communities have seen high concentrations of human metapneumovirus, or HMPV, detected in their wastewater, according to data from the WastewaterScan Dashboard, a public database that monitors sewage to track the presence of infectious diseases.https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-04/human-metapneumovirus-in-california-what-you-need-to-know?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

A Los Angeles Times data analysis found the communities of Merced in the San Joaquin Valley, and Novato and Sunnyvale in the San Francisco Bay Area have seen increases in HMPV levels in their wastewater between mid-December and the end of February.

HMPV has also been detected in L.A. County, though at levels considered low to moderate at this point, data show.

While HMPV may not necessarily ring a bell, it isn’t a new virus. Its typical pattern of seasonal spread was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, and its resurgence could signal a return to a more typical pre-coronavirus respiratory disease landscape.

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Israel’s military issued warnings to residents of dozens of border villages in southern Lebanon to evacuate “immediately” Wednesday as airstrikes on suburbs of Beirut intensified and Hezbollah claimed more attacks.

Lebanon was dragged into the broader war in the Middle East early Monday when Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into northern Israel, triggering Israeli retaliatory airstrikes that killed more than 70 people, wounded more than 400 and displaced tens of thousands of people from southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The ongoing conflict is not the first between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah began firing into Israel a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. After months of low-level fighting, a full-scale war erupted in September 2024 and Israel later launched a ground invasion of Lebanon.

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